Canada’s COVID response can’t compete

There’s an old thought experiment that asks: if you had no idea what your lot in life would be, what time and place would you choose to be born? If you want to annoy your lefty friends, it’s worth the mental effort, because by almost every measure, living in the Western world in modern times is better than any other place or time in history. But if we turn it around and apply the same experiment to the COVID-19 pandemic, would we still choose to live in Canada?

As with most things, Canadians have had a penchant for comparing our experience with that of our neighbours to the south. And indeed, when it comes to per capita case counts and deaths, we’re doing much better than the Americans.

It certainly didn’t help that donald Trump spent so much time downplaying the severity of the pandemic and suggesting it would magically disappear, and then paid so little heed to public health measures that he caught the virus himself. But such an analysis obscures the fact that Canada’s response has been mediocre at best, and that the united States has actually outperformed us in a number of areas, such as vaccines.

After assuming office, u.s. President Joe Biden said that America’s vaccine rollout had been “a dismal failure thus far.” But by the time Trump left office on Jan. 20, the u.s. had administered 16.5 million doses, which isn’t too shabby given that the first shot was delivered just over a month earlier. As of this writing, the u.s. has managed to get at least one dose of vaccine to 7.5 per cent of its population, compared to 2.3 per cent in Canada, according to numbers compiled by Bloomberg.

Indeed, despite the Trump administration’s many failings, its record on the vaccine file was a success of historic proportions, mainly thanks to Operation Warp Speed. The program, which was announced back in May, was designed to facilitate the development, manufacture and distribution of vaccines and other treatments for COVID-19 by forging public-private partnerships and significantly cutting the many layers of red tape that have made vaccine development such a costly and time-consuming process in the past.

It came with a hefty price tag: us$18 billion ($23 billion) and counting. But unlike the Canadian government’s approach to the pandemic — throw as much money as possible at the problem and hope it goes away — Operation Warp Speed was singularly focused on achieving its goals through targeted spending and regulatory reform. And it paid off. Without it, it’s safe to say we would not currently be having a debate over vaccine shortages, because we likely wouldn’t have any vaccines at all.

And even before Pfizer released the preliminary results of its vaccine trials in November, the u.s. government was actively working on a detailed plan for how to distribute it. By the end of October, the u.s. Centers for disease Control and Prevention had already released a second draft of its vaccination plan. That’s more than we can say for the Canadian government, whose strategy, if it has one, is still shrouded in mystery.

The Americans have also outperformed us at testing, having completed over twice as many tests per capita throughout the pandemic, and averaging 4.07 tests per thousand people over the past week, compared to 1.79 in Canada. rapid tests have also been in widespread use in u.s. workplaces, schools, colleges and professional sports leagues for some time.

Here at home, it’s the same story we’ve seen repeated numerous times since March. As with masks, Canadian health officials started out suggesting rapid tests could cause more harm than good, before doing an about-face and approving a number of test kits. The federal government has now delivered over 14.3 million rapid tests to the provinces, but most of them appear to be sitting in a closet somewhere.

Nova Scotia introduced an interesting pilot program in december that is seeing volunteers testing restaurant and bar patrons in downtown Halifax, but most other provinces still require health-care professionals to administer the tests.

Ontario ran a pilot program late last year that found 20 undetected cases in one Toronto school. But it was never scaled up, and today, most of the province’s 4.6 million rapid tests have gone unused, while schoolchildren are forced to attend virtual classes in parts of the province.

And Health Canada has still not approved any self-administered tests, which could allow Canadians to have some degree of certainty that they’re not infected before leaving the house. Canada’s chief medical officer is still using the tired excuse that they’re less accurate than lab tests — the same excuse used for the government dragging its feet on approving the initial batch of rapid tests. While true, the risk of more false negatives or positives is vastly outweighed by the benefit of catching some infections before they have a chance to spread.

What’s most infuriating is that, along with having a robust contact-tracing program in place, virtually none of this, save for something on the scale of Operation Warp Speed, was beyond the means of the Canadian government. But it has failed us at practically every turn.

We know from the experience of other democratic countries, like Australia and New Zealand, that stringent lockdowns and robust travel bans can virtually eliminate the virus from a country, and that strong track-and-trace programs, as many Asian countries have, can be used to effectively deal with any flare-ups before they start spreading like wildfire.

yet for all the smug remarks Canadians made when American states, especially those controlled by republicans, started reopening in the spring, it seems rather clear now that Canada’s provinces got caught up in all the hype and lifted restrictions far too early, as well.

There’s no question that lockdowns are economically devastating, but Australia has gone days without reporting a single case, after emerging from one of the world’s toughest lockdowns. For months, people have been relatively free to go about their lives and businesses are open, which seems demonstrably better — for the economy, for personal liberty and for the health and well-being of its citizens — than the half-cocked approach we took here in Canada. And while it certainly helps to be a continent unto yourself, I have little doubt that Canadians could have done it, if we had the will to do so.

So would Canada be my choice of countries to ride out the pandemic in, all things being equal? Not a chance, mate. Not when I could be passed out in a Melbourne pub or living it up on a beach in Sydney.

CANADA’S RESPONSE HAS BEEN MEDIOCRE AT BEST.